Immolated

Formed in São Paulo in 2006, Immolated emerged from the same brutal underground engine room that gave Brazil its reputation as one of the planet's most uncompromising death/grind producers, slotting in alongside the Rotten/Mutilation-lineage gore-grind scene that has churned through São Paulo's basement clubs since the late nineties. The lineup of Rodolfo Menezes on vocals and bass, Ivan Ribeiro on second vocals and guitar, Marcelo Alves on guitar and Lucas Sousa behind the kit cemented itself early with the demo Pleasure of Flesh, issued through the Brazilian underground label network and trafficked tape-to-tape and tab-to-tab through the DIY mailorder ecosystem that has kept South American grind alive. The sound is the classic paulistano formula: blast-driven brutal death metal welded to grindcore's sub-two-minute logic, riffs that pivot between Mortician-style sledgehammer chug and Rotten Sound velocity, drumming that alternates blasts with double-kick gallops, and vocals that lurch between cavernous gutturals and pig-squeal pinches. There is no genre re-invention here and none is wanted. Immolated belongs to the long tradition of Brazilian extreme music as a working-class catharsis valve, the same lineage that runs from Sepultura's earliest Cogumelo days through Krisiun, Rebaelliun, Headhunter D.C. and into the modern São Paulo gore-grind crop. It is a band that exists to violate small venues, to spit out splits and EPs at irregular intervals, and to feed the perpetual hunger of the country's death/grind tape-traders. Two-decade survivors of a scene that eats its young, they remain a fixture of paulistano underground bills.